by Luis de Lión
But what is the alternative? The indigenous precolonial past (not the modern reality of indigeneity) seems to be the only decolonial alternative, especially in a place like San Juan del Obispo, which was created as a haven for the sixteenth-century bishop Francisco Marroquín. The village retains neither language nor other overt, nonracial vestiges of its indigenous past. By contrast, for example, Santa María de Jesús, the next village up the road, only about five kilometers away, is still dominated by Kaqchikel speakers, and most of the women still normally wear traditional indigenous dress. If San Juan del Obispo wants to reject its colonial past by throwing off Catholicism/Spanish, what else might it have to replace these with?
In a clear repudiation of the church’s complicity with the racism and other abuses of the colonial model still in effect in Guatemala, the villagers unceremoniously remove the image of the Virgen de Concepción from her nook in the church and replace her with a “new virgin,” the Virgen of Death. This “virgin” consolidates those aspects of ancient Mesoamerican female deities that most contrast with the Catholic Virgin Mary—she is passionate, sexually voracious, violent, and unpredictable—and the village disintegrates into violence and chaos. The family unit falls apart in rampant domestic violence and the people of the community kill one another. Clearly the novel does not suggest this kind of substitution as a solution. This translation fails, too.
But the failure of the cultural rebellion carried out by the village does not mean that the act of rebellion was wrong in and of itself. The problem is that the villagers do not recognize the space between the two poles of their identity. Their “pure” ancestral past (one side of the paired terms that does not exist anymore, nor is it extractable from the reality of five hundred years of mestizaje) cannot provide a positive identity any more than the other side of the pair (Spanish/Catholic) can by itself. Therefore the answer for the village cannot come out of this substitution of one side of the binary for the other, the ideal, static “indigenous.” Instead, the multiple spaces in the middle that acknowledge all parts of San Juan del Obispo’s identities must be allowed to express themselves. Guatemala cannot solve its postcolonial problem simply by returning to the “indigenous” (a political position taken by many Maya activists today).
A Means-based Directive?
At this point the reader might clamor for a “solution” that can both achieve a decolonial alternative and lessen the psychological trauma the current situation can cause on an individual level; but the very notion of such an answer would inevitably resort to a poetics of the certain, and Xibalbá offers no such end-based solution. Instead we are left with a means-based plan of action that the novel itself exemplifies. To interpret this novel from my framework of levels of translation, the reader needs to remember the two different perspectives of the act of translation developed to this point. Rather than looking at the end result—the replacement/stand in—as the goal of cultural change, Xibalbá argues that the goal must be shorter term; the long-term goal will then take care of itself. Rather than worry about what the new translation should/will be in order to provide the village (Guatemala) with a positive alternative to its postcolonial condition, the village must focus on getting rid of repression in all its forms. The ensuing dynamic translation of the various mestizo identities available will organically fulfill the long-term translations on both the cultural and individual levels.
In short, it is repression in all its forms—religious, political, sexual, linguistic, and so on—that creates the unhealthy, artificial presence of the mestizo identity available on the surface. Currently, the mestizo presence is given meaning in a binary relationship based on the absence of what is repressed, creating a poetics of the certain. By contrast, when people do not accept repression prima facie, meaning is achieved by finding its expression in the space among the alternative moralities. The village, and Guatemala by extension, must refuse repression in all its forms because repression (whether in the name of the church, in the name of the state, in the name of the primitive, in the name of the Market, or in the wholesale rejection of anything), brings on the unhealthy, schizophrenic identity of San Juan of the Bishop. Repression does not allow the various aspects of the complex mosaic to express themselves in a healthy way—a way that will foster positive futures for Guatemalans—a way that has actually expressed its own morality across the mestizo spectrum.
That is why de Lión’s widow, María Tula de León, and his daughter, Mayarí de León, have dedicated their lives to three projects, undertaken in Luis de Lión’s name; all of these initiatives seek to throw off repression in its different forms. Luis de Lión lost his life because the Guatemalan government brutally repressed his artistic voice and his political calls for a more equitable distribution of Guatemala’s resources. The Casa Museo Luis de Lión, the Luis de Lión library, and the Academia Comunitaria de Arte de San Juan del Obispo seek to throw off this repression in several ways because Mayarí and doña María see this as de Lión’s most important legacy.
The museum throws off repression by bringing to light the sordid history of Guatemala’s repressive military regimes—backed both financially and morally by the United States—in their campaign to kidnap, torture, and kill tens of thousands, like de Lión, who sought alternatives to the postcolonial reality still oppressing Guatemala. In the past, this information was censored. The library provides books and computers to the children of San Juan so information cannot be repressed as it was for so many centuries both through enforced illiteracy among the indigenous communities and through direct censorship. Last, the school seeks to develop the artistic abilities of the children of San Juan so that they can express their various identities and resistances through artistic means, as did de Lión himself.
Translation, on all the levels developed above, can only be effective when it allows that it is a partial, ongoing solution, an incomplete melding of all the unspoken, discarded choices. By targeting all kinds of repression as the culprit rather than focusing on the end definitions, even those discarded choices can still maintain a voice in the discursive process. Xibalbá shows that translation cannot/should not attempt to repress all of the possible choices by pretending to stand in for the original enunciation. Instead it must celebrate the poetics of the uncertain inherent in all language and embrace the spaces between.
Notes
1. The fact that this translation comes filtered through the eyes of de Lión’s widow, María Tula de León, adds yet another layer of deferral. I went over all the difficult passages of the novel with doña Maria over a month of meetings in the summer of 2010 as part of our agreement to execute and publish this translation. This exercise was immensely helpful because she was with de Lión when he wrote the novel and understands the context of its production like no one else. She even participated in its production in terms of his having solicited her opinion for specific decisions he made. In the context of deferral, this is significant because it adds another layer, since this context is inevitably filtered through time and memory.
2. In his Taking Their Word, Arturo Arias alludes to this titular principiar as a marker, but he does not develop this line of thought.
3. At least it was when I was growing up and when de Lión was writing this novel. The prevalence of television and radio and the fact that many more indigenous people have a few years of formal education has caused a gradual reduction in differences like this one in most of t
he larger or more centrally located towns and villages.
4. See Arias’s afterword in this volume for more on the particular nature of Xibalbá, especially in the Popol Wuj.
5. Dennis Tedlock, Barbara Tedlock, and Laura Martin all separately identify different aspects of K’iche’ discourse that enact complementary dualities in order to describe things and concepts as only having meaning in human language in the interstices between a discursive pair. Wes Collins carries this out with another Maya Guatemalan language, Mam.
6. K’iche’ is the most widely spoken Maya language in Guatemala. It is closely related to Kaqchikel, which is the language spoken in the areas around San Juan del Obispo. See Arias’s afterword in this volume for more on the different indigenous groups and languages in de Lión’s Guatemala.
7. Allen Christensen, on the other hand, translates chuchkajaw as priest-shaman, which, while still a paired term, loses the sense of gender-busting complementary duality in its role definition.
8. Of course concha is also vulgar slang for vagina, which has all kinds of other applications here. See Karen Poe for more on these connotations.
9. In fact, in Guatemala concha is the name of the meat alone (as in ceviche de concha, which does not include shells) as well as the name of the shell alone.
10. See the glossary note and/or Arias’s afterword in this volume for an explanation of the Guatemalan meaning of Ladino.
11. Ronald Nibbe (personal communication) makes the connection between this hueco and the derogatory term “Oreo” for an “Uncle Tom” African American (black on the outside, white on the inside) or “Banana” for a similarly assimilated Asian American (yellow on the outside, white on the inside). Nibbe passed away in 2010 when this translation was still nascent, but he was instrumental in helping me in the early stages of getting this project going and encouraging me through the many hurdles.
12. Although transgender theory may read emasculation as transformation without the negative aspects of mutilation, the reference earlier to the mutilated penis (de Lión’s “el pene mutilado”) of the dog that Pascual violently separates from its mate with a machete seems to support the association here. Certainly there is room here for a different interpretation within the scope of several emerging transgender theoretical approaches.
13. Certainly this would be true no matter the context since the term is a direct legacy of the racially based caste system from the colonial era.
14. Arias, in his Taking Their Word, claims that the reader of the novel “discovers that the two main characters, Pascual Baeza and Juan Caca, are in reality two sides of the same being” (67). I don’t agree that this possibility is ever certain enough to say “in reality.” To be sure, the psychoanalytic certainty of this “diagnosis” leads to a different reading strategy than the uncertainty I propose here. Arias calls the psychological disorder “split personality,” which would correspond to the dissociative disorder in my argument. Juan’s symptoms at the end of “The Day Came” and in the “Epi . . . taph” seem to have progressed and reflect those symptoms psychoanalysts would diagnose as schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. The important difference in my reading here is that the connection between Juan and Pascual could, under a different perception/interpretation strategy by Juan, actually turn into a model of the healthy dissolution of the self/extended community division at the heart of the philosophy of the ego that underlies psychoanalytic diagnoses like these.
Works Cited
Arias, Arturo. Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Christenson, Allen J. K’iche’–English Dictionary. Available at the FAMSI website at http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/dictionary/christenson/quidic_complete.pdf, 2003. Accessed November 16, 2011.
Collins, Wesley. “Centeredness as a Cultural and Grammatical Theme in Maya-Mam.” PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 2005.
Glissant, Edouard. Faulkner, Mississippi. Translated by Barbara Lewis and Thomas Spear. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
Martin, Laura. “Traditional Mayan Rhetorical Forms and Symbols: From the Popol Vuh to El tiempo principia en Xibalbá.” Latin American Indian Literatures Journal 23, 1 (Spring 2007): 43–65.
Poe, Karen. “Sexo, cuerpo e identidad en El tiempo principia en Xibalbá de Luis de Lión.” Reflexiones 82, 2 (2003): 83–91.
Tedlock, Barbara. Time and the Highland Maya. Rev. ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992.
Tedlock, Dennis. “Toward a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability.” In Close Listening: Poetry of the Performed Word. Edited by Charles Bernstein, 178–199. Oxford: University Press, 1998.
TIME COMMENCES IN XIBALBÁ
—First There Was the Wind . . .
IT BLEW INTO TOWN like it was just playing—jumping all over the place, flicking at the muddy trousers of the tired, bored, sleepy men; tickling the little boys’ tummies; sneaking up the women’s skirts, licking their grimy, shapeless legs.—¡Look! What a mischievous little wind—said one of the women. But, no sooner had she spoken, than the wind, like someone who gets mad over the silliest little thing, opened its snout and . . . then it was impossible to hear anything at all. Not even the wind itself. It was as if the noise were the silence. The very first blast broke up the groups of men puffing on their cigarettes there on the street corners, and they ran, buffeted from behind, chasing their hats like white kites that disappeared into the sooty night; an ancient woman, so old and blind she couldn’t find anywhere to hide, ended up blowing head over heels through the streets of the town; the little rascals who were still playing in their yards went tumbling down the slopes into the vacant lots, followed by their mamas who, more flying than running, threw themselves after them until they could grab hold of a leg, or an arm, and, with all their might, haul them back to their houses. The wind whipped open and slammed shut all of the doors in the town, again and again, making a mockery of latches, keys, locks; the wind broke down fences and ripped apart thatched roofs; it made off with sheets of tin roofing and smashed roof tiles; it got up under the beds, filling everything with dirt; it hurtled through the cooking pots, smashing them; it killed the chickens, scratched at the clothes of the people, bit into their flesh, and ran its rough, blunt tongue all the way up past their hearts, to the very bottom of life itself. Curled up, piled together, the grown-ups covered up their kids; while outside, squealing, whimpering, crying, people let themselves be thrown to the ground so as not to be battered; the trees reached out to the birds; and the birds, gone mad, their wings broken, unable to flee toward the stars, moribund, some not even half alive, reached out to the trees, too. But it didn’t last long; only as long as it takes you to walk around your kitchen, but slow, real slow, like if you had rheumatism. That’s how long it lasted and then it was gone. Everyone saw how it suddenly sort of found the road and went off looking for other people, other places. Because it wasn’t wind. It was an animal in the shape of wind. Or it was a person in the shape of an animal. But then, after the wind went around that last corner in town and dove into the wall of cypress trees that runs along the country road, then the other thing came.
It came from this side of town, where the sun comes up. From over there where the plain ends just past the bar
bed wire, a little above where the pines whistle and whistle at the palo de señorita shrubs, exactly there where that little current of water comes down in the winter, forming a cascade of sparkling glass shards among the rocks. The whole town thought it must have been that they wanted the chickens, or the birds, that it was because the wind had blown by them carrying the scent of chicken blood. But no. Soon it became clear that it wasn’t that. A thread, that’s all that could be heard at first—a long, long, long, thread. Then another thread joined the first one. Then another. And another. And soon, among them all, they had woven together a funeral dirge that would stretch itself out and then shrink back down. Then, the dogs came out from where they had taken refuge from the wind; each one walked to the door that faced the street, sat down, and looked toward where the sun drops into the canyon, and began, at length, to make a chorus, like a person who spits his sorrow out of his mouth in the shape of a single, long worm. The howls of the coyotes and the dogs blanketed the village. Still huddled together, the people were struck mute; they wanted to talk to each other but their mouths would neither close nor open. It was their hands and faces, through gestures and wrinkles, that said everything there was to be said. But the blanket tore apart. Nothing left of it but shreds. As if it had been struck with a machete. The ragged threads of the howls that were still close to the animals’ snouts were drawn back into their mouths, swallowed again, quickly; but the other loose threads of the shredded blanket of howls, those that were closer to the frightened ears hearing them, took a very long time to trail off into the night.